Uncategorized – Notes From the Potting Shed

Responding to Trump

There will be no shortage of reaction to the US election over the coming days and weeks. I spent a good chunk of Tuesday night holding a week-and-a-half old baby and anxiously refreshing my news feed as the results trickled in. Sleep deprivation and paternal emotions didn’t exactly help, but as the night wore on and the outlook got bleaker, I found myself, like many others no doubt, moving through a whole cocktail of anger, despair and fear.

While the consequences of a second Trump presidency will be unavoidably global, not being American, I don’t exactly have skin in the game. The voices of those who will be far more directly impacted ought to be listened to far more attentively than mine, writing from the comfort of distance. But writing is the best means I know of processing, so here are some raw reflections on how I want to respond. Grief, perspective and resilience.

Grief

I’m recognising already a desire in me to move to activity and solutions. But I don’t want to move too fast through the grief of this moment.

I don’t think that Harris was a perfect candidate and there’s plenty about the Democratic party that I don’t love. Like everyone else, I’m bringing all my own biases and preferences into this election, but this isn’t grief because my team didn’t win. I spend my time cultivating young leaders of character, faithfulness and integrity, and Trump is the antithesis of just about everything that we teach. And worst of all, he does it with the blessing of the vast majority of white evangelicals.

So, grief is, I think, an entirely appropriate response and one which I don’t want to move through too fast. It is right, in this moment, to give voice to the suffering of those now living in heightened fear. It is right to grieve the cultural captivity of white evangelicalism and the many factors that created a discipleship culture willing to compromise biblical and moral integrity for a taste of power.[1] It is right to grieve the social dislocation that has left so many feeling left behind and aggrieved. And it is right to grieve the inability of urban, globalist ‘anywhere’ progressives to empathize with the predominantly rural ‘somewheres’ who are drawn to Trump.[2] Like so many left-leaning political parties at the moment, the Democrats seem to be guilty of treating their opponents with dehumanising and condescending derision, all the while failing to tell a better story than the populist, nostalgia-ridden nativism of MAGA.

Perspective

One thing we don’t need right now is another straight, white, male, middle-class Christian leader telling us that it will be ok. That’s why we mustn’t deny or avoid the grief. But just as the psalms of lament are directed at God, perspective in the midst of grief is important.

I need to remember that my loyalty is not ultimately to a party, or a nation state, or even to liberal democracy. I prefer certain parties to others, I’m grateful to live in the UK, and I certainly would choose liberal democracy out of all the options available. But my life is centred on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and that means that my allegiance is to him and my hope is in his Kingdom. That faith propels me to join in with his mission to push back chaos and darkness and work for peace, justice and fruitfulness in the world. But it also protects me from buying into the secular mythology of progress – the idea that history is moving up and to the right. My faith teaches me that we are living in the overlap of the old world of death and decay and God’s new world of justice and wholeness – what theologians call the ‘now and not yet’. With this perspective, I shouldn’t be surprised when power ends up in the hands of those who ought not to be trusted with it. Of course, we fight to elect leaders who will serve the common good. We grieve, we intercede, we hold to account, and (where no other options remain) we non-violently resist when that is not the case. But we also acknowledge that for as long as Sin, chaos and evil are on the loose, any political progress this side of new creation will be compromised and provisional at best. We work and hope for the flourishing of our neighbours, but we’re also realistic in our expectations. We can’t build the kingdom without the King.

Resilience

Resilience isn’t about grit, or optimism, or stubborn idealism. It’s a gift we receive. It’s about a sure and steadfast hope that charges the struggle with resurrection purpose and allows us to adapt, to grow and keep going even when things are dark and hard and costly.

We mustn’t move too fast into activity. We need to allow the space to grieve. But what if we choose to see this moment as a summons?

If crisis precedes renewal, then could this moment of cultural captivity, theo-political idolatry and evangelical hypocrisy be a barren dessert poised for springs of newness and rebirth? I want to be careful – there are no easy answers or silver linings here.

For those of us convicted that Jesus is Lord (and not any president, nation state or ideology), for those of us that see love of God expressed not in the in puritanical policing of boundaries but in how we treat the most vulnerable in our societies, and for those of us who trust that the kingdom comes not through might and power but through suffering love, there is work to do.

The antidote to the bad is the practice of the good. If there is much within white American evangelicalism that has contributed to the ethical incongruence of electing Trump a second time, then it’s on us not simply to call out all that is wrong, but to tell and live out a better story.

That’s not a call to frantic, restless activity. That will get us nowhere. It’s a call to devote our lives to the slow, patient work of becoming the sorts of disciples capable of seeking justice faithfully, sustainably and holistically. That means rooting ourselves in the full, redemptive story of the bible. That means living out a politics which cares for the most vulnerable, which refuses to allow ends to justify means and which cannot be co-opted by any party or ideology. That means the unglamorous daily decisions to choose the way of suffering love over comfort, convenience and self-promotion.

[1] Soong-Chan Rah, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times (Downers Grove: IVP, 2015)

[2] David Goodheart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: Penguin, 2017)

Cynicism and parenting

‘I’d rather be gullible than cynical’

Sometimes you hear a phrase that feels a bit like a punch to the gut – striking unexpectedly and leaving you reeling. I had that sensation a bit over a year ago, listening to Pete Greig reflect on a podcast about the Asbury outpouring. It has stuck with me since.

The slow dismantling of a weary cynicism was a major arena where I experience God’s gentle grace during my sabbatical last summer. It was a fight I then carried into the months that followed as I returned to ministry with all of the frustrations, stresses and tensions inherent to all meaningful work this side of new creation.

I long to be more buoyant and less reserved. I long for more delight, laughter and play. And I long to worry and brood a whole lot less.

I want to live with the unspeakable, effervescent joy of someone who believes in the resurrection. But all too often, I live deflated, turned inwards, pre-occupied by my little concerns and hurts, frustrated at things that don’t go exactly how I want them to, or just a bit scared and worn out by so much in our world that is not right.

I grow cynical.

I grow old.

Now, there is a type of growing old that I long for – a maturation, a softening of hard-edges, an uninhibited intimacy with God and others, an eroding of ego, a confidence in who I am and a disinterest in trying to be anyone else, a depth of peace and poise – the kind that comes not from comfort and ease, but from the long obedience of showing up and giving yourself away. Some people call this sort of holy aging a ‘second naivete.’

But holy aging is rare. It does not seem to be a given. More often, growing old seems to come with unresolved baggage, festering wounds, a narrowing of horizon and a raising of drawbridges. A turning in on oneself rather than out to others. Cynicism.

Right now, parenting feels like it presents me with a daily choice. Which sort of aging do I want? The way of cynicism, or the way of the second naivete?

It could wear me down, I could despise the monotony and seek refuge in escapism, I could lick the wounds of my exhaustion, cultivate self-pity, fantasise all the ‘what-ifs’ of different life decisions, and see these years as a struggle for survival. Honestly, this feels like the pull of the tide.

Or… or I could see these precious days before the routine of school as opportunities to nurture attachment, to attune with and delight in this awesome gift of a boy who God has entrusted to our care. And I could see the monotony itself as a deep invitation.

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father in younger than we.

GK Chesterton

Another punch to the gut.

But a good one. A welcome one. One that I need to hear over and over.

I don’t know if it will get easier over time. Perhaps. But right now making this choice to become the father and the man that I want to be, not the one that my apathy and lethargy drag me towards, is hard. I’m very much not nailing it.

But if being clear on the destination is a big part of the journey, then I am at least progressing. As always, it’s a long obedience in the same direction.

Reflecting on Sabbatical

Having been back at work for a few weeks now, it feels like a good time to reflect on my three-month sabbatical. I came into sabbatical excited but also in quite a cynical and exhausted place. I hoped for a time of deep rest – a slowing down to be present to God and to my family. I wrote in the first week about a desire to go back to the basics – to simply receive and delight in God’s goodness.

So, how did it go? My workplace’s sabbath policy did not require me to accomplish anything to justify my sabbatical. I’ve been hugely grateful for that freedom. Overall, I have loved this time. Sabbath rest in its various forms is always a gift – God’s gift – which I am grateful to receive. I have loved the simplicity and spaciousness of it. It was precious to have time to play with my son without worrying about getting to the next meeting, time to go for long walks and bike rides, time to read books just because I wanted to read them.

And yet, in many ways, it did not go how I had hoped. Midway through I had to return to work because our funding looked like it was in trouble. I didn’t return full-time, but it meant that the second half of sabbatical was very different from the first – less present and restful, more distracted and stressful and hurried. It felt like my mind, body and soul were just beginning to recover from the toll of a difficult season of work and life, and then I was unexpectedly thrown back in again.

There was definitely some grief there. Grief that my sabbatical was not going to not match up to the years of hopes and dreams I had invested in it. I found myself frustrated at God. In the Hebrew Bible, the practice of sabbath is an act of trust in God’s provision – trusting that God will provide even when we stop work. And, honestly, it felt like God had not kept His side of the deal. There were some hard days processing that disappointment, but I was able to land with some perspective, remembering that sabbatical is a gift, not an entitlement, and a gift that the vast majority of people do not get to enjoy. I could be angry and frustrated that it did not go to plan, or I could make the most of the time that I had. I tried, imperfectly, to choose the latter.

There are no great achievements from my sabbatical – no book, no qualification, no dramatic spiritual breakthrough. I did read quite a few books and got myself a bit fitter. And I think sabbatical has changed me.

Chatting with my spiritual director earlier this week, the theme that kept coming up as we reflected on sabbatical was that I think it humbled me.

Slowing down and being more present at home are lovely in theory, but I found them hard in practice. Maybe for the first time in adult life I could not avoid the question of who I am when I am not working hard and achieving things. I liked to imagine that I was basically quite a kind and patient person, but I was humbled to discover that it only took a few days of childcare or bad sleep or my wife being ill to break that façade. My son is wonderful, but he is two, and that comes with a whirlwind of big feelings and an endless supply of energy. The mundanity of parenting confronted me with my deep selfishness. To my shame, I would catch myself fantasising about how much more fun sabbatical would be without a child.

The humbling came on other levels too – the humbling of achieving far less than I’d hoped for even after I’d tried to manage my expectations and ambitions, and the humbling of realising that I had not done enough to set my team up to thrive while I was off. It wasn’t what I expected from sabbatical, but at the same time, the humbling was not unwelcome. There haven’t been dramatic moments of spiritual encounter over this time, but I’m confident that God has been at work in me – and I think there is grace in the way that I’ve been confronted with my own weakness and self-reliance.

I was nervous about returning to work, but I’ve actually really enjoyed returning fully into the swing of things over the last few weeks. Where I was quite tired and cynical in May, I’ve come back with a fresh energy, vision and passion for work. In the final weeks of sabbatical I re-read some of the books that got me excited about a radical pursuit of Jesus and justice when I was an undergraduate and I felt a re-affirmation of vocation – a renewed clarity that this role and this movement is where God is calling me right now. Being confronted with my selfishness has helped me, very imperfectly, to love my wife and my son better. And on a very simple level, I love Jesus more. I’ve been angry at him, for sure, but I’ve also been wooed again by his beauty and goodness. I don’t need to justify sabbatical, but if I did, I’d say those are good outcomes.

I don’t want to try to force a positive spin on this. Parts of it have been really hard, sad and frustrating. But that is the reality of life this side of new creation. Many more parts have been gentle, precious and deeply restful. It may not have been exactly the gift I had anticipated, but it was most certainly a gift.

Gardening as Liturgy: Part 1

In his essay, Think Little, Wendell Berry says that ‘I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening.’ It’s a good challenge to my tendency to assume that big problems require big solutions. I struggle to believe that small, local, personal action could make any significant dent in an issue as massive as the climate crisis.

Berry is not saying that we should opt for small, local actions (like gardening) instead of pursuing change on the level of national and international politics, economics and business. He is warning that we should be sceptical of any ‘big’ ecological solutions that are abstracted from any meaningful, real relationship of cultivation and care-giving with the land.

I think that Berry would claim that the root causes of the climate crisis are a fundamentalist addiction to limitless growth, to ever accelerating technological innovation and to the assumption that bigger is better. He is sceptical of solutions that uncritically perpetuate those root causes and insists that real change needs to begin in cultivating deep, stable, flourishing local economies.

‘Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence – that is, the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods’
‘Word and Flesh,’ in Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (London: Penguin, 2018)

Whether or not gardening really is the best form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment, the claim got me thinking. Perhaps I have too limited, even too secular, a view of gardening. What if gardening is more than just a nice hobby or a good, mindful leisure activity? What if it’s actually closer to a spiritual discipline – a practice that is not merely an expression or outworking of my identity, but is involved in forming and shaping my identity?

James K.A. Smith is a writer I’ve been wanting to explore for a while – I’ve had multiple friends recommend him and read multiple authors who seem heavily influenced by his work. Recently, I finally read Desiring the Kingdom where he unpacks the idea of liturgies. Let me try a brief summary:

Much of western protestant theology, he says, operates with a faulty philosophical anthropology. In other words, an inaccurate understanding of what it means to be human. This ‘rationalist’ distortion, inherited from the Enlightenment, has tended to treat human beings primarily as ‘thinking things’ – as minds which happen to have bodies attached. This has led to an overemphasis in Christian education and discipleship on doctrine, on believing the right things, and a neglect of the importance of what we do with our bodies: practices and rituals.

Smith argues that a holistic, biblical anthropology sees human beings as embodied creatures.

‘What if the core of our identity is located more in the body that the mind? Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly.’
James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 32

Our desires – what we love, what we hope for, our visions for the good life – shape us on a deeper level than what we believe on a purely intellectual level. Hence Smith’s snappy phrase ‘you are what you love.’ And our desires are not innate or static – they are dynamic and fluid – and formed by liturgy. Smith has a specific definition of liturgies: they are embodied rituals that are formative for identity. Liturgies are the practices which shape who we become.

All of us, all of the time, are being shaped by liturgies – whether religious worship or ‘secular liturgies’ like watching TV or shopping – our desires are shaped in particular directions and trained towards a certain imagination of what human flourishing is. And so I want to explore gardening as a liturgy – as an identify-forming habit. In what ways are the mundane routines of sowing and harvesting, tending and weeding shaping what I love, and therefore shaping the person I am becoming? My hope is that the reflections that follow this post will allow me to familiarise myself with Smith’s ideas at the same time as reframing how I think about gardening.

Review: Restless Devices by Felicia Wu Song

One of the best books that I have read this year is Felicia Wu Song’s Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age. It is a diagnosis of much that is unhealthy with the culture of permanent connectivity that has been proliferated by digital technology. Her assessment never romanticises the past to dismiss the benefits of digital technology, but she outlines clearly and persuasively many of the costs we are (often) uncritically paying as individuals and as society as a result of our digital addiction. There are many parts of what she writes that I would like to explore more. In this article, I’ll focus on her reflections on being human and having limits.

One of Song’s starting points is to dismiss the idea that digital technologies are merely tools – neutral instruments that can be used for good or bad. Instead, she argues that their design privileges certain options. Social media, for example, is designed to captivate our attention and mine us of our data. It does so very successfully because it is designed to be addictive by delivering the emotions we crave rather than the complexity we need to interact healthily with the world. Far from a benign tool, digital technology tells a powerful story about what it is to be human and how we should live together; a story narrated by corporations whose concern is for their profits not our best interests.

The story that digital technology immerses us in bends our assumptions about what it means to be human. It teaches us to view the very limits that make us human – the limits of our bodies, of time, and of place – as inconvenient restraints to transcend. I will try to briefly summarise each of those.

The digital impacts our relationship with our bodies in many ways – not least in its leaning towards disembodiment. The physical limitations of our bodies are regarded as a nuisance. Living rooted in community with actual in-the-flesh human beings – in particular those ‘others’ who are not like us – is regarded as unnecessary when online connection allows us to self-define who we are in the abstract.

The digital encourages us to transcend the limits of time by at once monopolising our attention (distracting us from the things that really matter) and bombarding us far more opportunities than we could ever have time for. This keeps us in a state of FOMO (fear of missing out) and anxious busyness where virtually all stillness is removed from our lives by a constant urge to check our phones to ensure that we are not missing out. Time becomes a competitor we race against and try (always unsuccessfully) to master.

The digital immerses us in a story that is placeless and displacing, that interacts with the physical world only as potential fodder for our social media profiles, that places no value on rootedness or fidelity to a particular place. Some might say it fosters a nomadic lifestyle, but that is to misunderstand the strong community dynamics in nomadic tribes. Instead, what digital technology fosters is a form of hyper-individualism that masquerades as ‘freedom’ but which in reality is an isolating force severing us from any connection to place or people.

Recently, I re-read The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks. It is the beautifully written story of a Lake District Shepherd. The book ends with the haunting line ‘this is my life, I want no other.’ I say haunting because I am struck by how few people I know who could honestly say that of their lives. The digital technology that we are immersed in feeds off and encourages the exact opposite – shaping us into people who long for lives other than the one we are living. That is at the heart of the attempts to transcend the limits of bodies, time and place – it is essentially saying ‘this is my life, and I desperately want another.’ And the tragedy of this drive towards transcendence is that it diminishes the exact things that make for human flourishing. Instead, we are being shaped into disembodied, lonely, angry, narcissistic, frantic, displaced and uprooted people. And this isn’t accidental. The power-brokers of digital capitalism know that disembodied, lonely, angry, narcissistic, frantic, displaced and uprooted people will consume more social media. And so, they hook our attention and sell it to advertisers, at huge profit for them and huge cost to the wellbeing and flourishing of human beings, of local communities, of our politics and our societies.

We need a better story. That is what Song proposes in the second half of the book. If our digital routines are ‘secular liturgies’ which form our habits, values and imagination, then we must practice ‘counter-liturgies,’ which ground us in a better story. The main practices she outlines are designed to reorient us around the limits of bodies, time and place – and receiving those limits as gifts, rather than as restrains to transcend.

She talks about embodied, faithful presence and the importance of being with others in real physical community – especially those who are not like us. She talks about sabbath as a practice to root us in the gift of time. And she talks about sacred space as a practice that dares us to show up to our place without digital distraction.

These counter-liturgies excite me. They frame spiritual practices as acts of resistance – habits which, through simple repetition and mundane persistence, might just make plausible that elusive line from James Rebanks. I’m not sure about this, but I wonder if a significant test of our faithfulness at making disciples in the digital age, is the extent to which we cultivate the conditions that make it possible for us to honestly declare ‘this is my life, I want no other.’ To that end, I hugely recommend Song’s book to anyone interested in spiritual formation in this cultural moment.

Lucky

Since being matched with the child we will adopt, people quite often tell us how lucky this little boy is going to be to have us as parents.

They are always well-intentioned words spoken with great kindness. I am grateful for them. And yet, they jar a little.

Flannery O’Connor described sentimentality as ‘a distortion … in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence.’ I think that’s what I struggle with when people tell me that our little boy is going to be lucky. It’s an overemphasis on innocence.

It wasn’t long into the countless pages of reports, set on pale, austere paper that the option of sentimentality departed us. In the bleak assessments of wonderful, overworked social workers we encountered the world of chaos and pain into which this boy was born.

His being placed for adoption – that genealogical aberration, that ultimate severance – may be many things, but please don’t call it lucky.

I mean that as a gentle plea, not as an angry accusation.

To describe adoption as lucky does not honour his story. It ignores the unimaginable pain of separation that he is still too small to understand but feels all the same.

It also places a burden on us to be the heroes that we know we cannot be. I know that’s not anyone’s intention. I know people just want to affirm us and encourage us as we adventure into parenting – we certainly need that! But we are not heroes. We happen to have the stability, health, space and energy that makes adoption possible at this stage in our lives. We haven’t earned any of that. We are just doing what we think is right with what God has given us. If that’s heroic then we should be celebrating many thousands of other heroes who do the long, patient and unseen work of imperfectly attempting to be faithfully obedient to Jesus.

It’s going to be strange, in a few weeks, when we bring our little boy home for the first time. Beautiful, I’m sure, but unavoidably strange – to meet the one we have so far only known through pictures and words, to transition so suddenly from total strangers to closest relatives. We’re not expecting it to be easy.

I hope we will be the parents he needs. But he will not be lucky to have us. We will be the lucky ones – lucky to be entrusted with his care. Or maybe luck just isn’t the most helpful word – it’s too impersonal. We approach this not as entitled owners asserting our rights to this child, but as reverent recipients of a gift. We do not deserve him, but he is a gift which we will steward with gratitude and awe.

Woven in with all the bleakness and ambiguity, pain and challenge, there is an irrepressible thread of grace.

May we have eyes to see.

The Two Paths

When I think about vocation – what to do with my life – I find myself compelled by two paths that seem to lead in quite different directions.

I’ll call one path the way of service. This is a school of thought that seems to be especially common in more missional and activist spaces and seems to set most comfortably with more utilitarian or reformed worldviews. The heartbeat of the way of service is that the purpose of my life is to give myself away, laying down my ambitions and sacrificing my pleasure for the good of others. Popular slogans for this way of approaching vocation often sound like they come from a gym or a battlefield, include things like: ‘Don’t waste your life,’ ‘Do all the good you can,’ ‘Fight the good fight,’ ‘Spend yourself on behalf of the hungry,’ ‘Push right to your limits,’ ‘Leave nothing on the field.’ It’s a path that might lead people to incarnational mission in a rough area or working a particularly demanding job or practicing radical simplicity in order to give generously.

The other path is the way of wholeness. This is a school of thought that is perhaps best exemplified by the likes of Wendell Berry and Eugene Peterson and is more popularly championed by a lot of the books about rest, self-care and emotional health that have come out in the last decade or two (many of which seem to be reactions against some of the more extreme aspects of the way of service). The way of wholeness is all about integrity and character-formation. It cares more about being than doing. It values rest, limits, creativity, art and beauty. On the way of wholeness, it is ok for something to be a good in itself – not everything needs to be a means to an end. It is a path that leads people to value family life over their careers or local neighbourhoods over upward mobility or slowness and fullness over speed and achievement.

On the surface, these feel like divergent paths pulling in very different directions. And that’s what I find difficult, because though there are some very attractive parts to both paths, there are also significant dangers.

I love the other-centredness, the sense of purpose and the missional drive in the way of service. I want my life to count, I want to serve others like Jesus does and that means that there will be cost and suffering. But I also recognise dangers in the way of service – dangers of scraping through life stressed, joyless and frantically busy, dangers of indulging messiah complexes or creating dependencies, dangers of baptising a thoroughly secular workaholism and addiction to results, dangers of neglecting my own health and formation, dangers of hurting those I love in the name of serving God.

And on the other hand, I love the depth and the slowness of the way of wholeness. I love the value it places on being, not just doing. I love the space it creates for character formation and rest and beauty. I love the respect it has for humans as whole beings. I want to live a life that is full, and thriving, and sustainable. I want to grow into a disciple of maturity, peace and joy. But I also recognise dangers in the way of wholeness – dangers of mistaking self-care for self-absorption, dangers of slowly drifting into a comfortable life of consumption and middle-class affluence, dangers of opting out of anything that might be costly or hard, dangers of unrealised potential, dangers of living a life that is closed in on itself and withdrawn from the world.

Both paths are good. Both pick up on clear traditions within scripture and throughout church history. But either path, pursued in isolation, is problematic.

And so surely the answer is some sort of creative tension – a third path – one which keeps both paths within sight but refuses to veer too far towards one at the cost of losing track with the other.

It’s one thing to identify that tension in theory. But I am entering a stage of life now where suddenly there are quite a few big decisions to be made. I want to live on purpose – by design not by default. But that is hard when the path you want to take is the tricky way of tension and negotiation rather than the superficially frictionless paths of either extreme.

It’s good to know that we are not on our own. It’s good to know that there are others who have held this tension before us, who have lived lives where service and wholeness harmonise and reinforce each other. That certainly helps. And whilst there are big decisions that feel far too ‘adult’ for me to make, I have a suspicion that the actual business of holding the tension of service and wholeness will happen primarily in the day-to-day, in the mundane, in the small things. That removes some of the fear from those big decisions. It also brings all of this down from the future and the theoretical level to the more immediate and tangible, more containable level of who I am choosing to become today. That’s where we carve out this third path – that’s where the adventure is.

Unsporting: giving up the consumption of sport

Photo by **Torsten Dettlaff** from **Pexels**

In Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann writes about the restless anxiety and violent competitiveness that proliferates in society. ‘The totem,’ he says, ‘of such restlessness is perhaps professional sports … The endless carnival of those sports constitutes a dramatic affirmation of power, wealth, and virility in which “victory” is accomplished by many abusive exploitations, all in pursuit of winning and being on top of the heap of the money game.’[1]

When I first read it a few years ago I mostly dismissed it. This, I thought, is probably a bit of an American thing that doesn’t really apply to me. Surely, I can enjoy a bit of professional sport and still practice sabbath, still resist the culture of restless anxiety and live into God’s alternative values of neighbourliness, justice and rest.

But something from my initial reading clearly lodged in my mind and it has come to the fore over the last few weeks. We’ve had quite a summer of sport – the football, the rugby and the Olympics have all drawn me in. I’ve had excited conversations with friends, eagerly awaited player ratings and team selections, watched analysis and read punditry – all of it on a level that I don’t remember doing before.

I’ve tried to be sensible and retain some boundaries, particularly around work, but that has simply meant that my rest and weekends this summer have largely been dominated by the consumption of ‘the endless carnival’ of professional sport. I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing in itself and there certainly have been moments that I have enjoyed. But there have increasinly been moments where I have wondered about the influence this is all having on me. If we become what we give our attention to, then how is this consumption of sport shaping me? Who is it forming me into?

My relationship with sport has always been a little complicated. Growing up, I got fairly seriously into a number of sports. But I don’t know if I’ve ever really enjoyed playing sport. I enjoyed the winning, but I’m not sure I especially enjoyed the playing in a purer sense. The angry tears that would often come if I made a mistake on a football pitch may just about be a thing of the past, but that unpleasant competitive edge has carried from playing sport as a teenager into the more vicarious world of consuming professional sport as an adult. For whatever reasons, I seem to have especially struggled this summer. When England lost the Euros and when the Lions lost the test series my sleep was affected for days. What does it say about my priorities when I don’t lose a wink of sleep over a drug overdoses on our estate, but a few jaw-droppingly wealthy men, a ball and the inevitable ability to over-promise and under-deliver can wreck my body’s rhythms?

The capacity professional sport has to affect my mood and command my attention worries me. And so does the anger that I’ve felt – whether directed at players, coaches, officials or other nations. Again, the questions come: ‘who is this forming me into?’ ‘what in me is being appealed to here?’ Surely what is being appealed to are ugly, broken, unkind parts of me that need deep work, not casual encouragement. Surely, I am not being formed into a person of love, character, depth and integrity. Instead, I am being formed into someone who is angry, tribal and distracted – abdicating from the risk and pain of engaging meaingfully in the reality of the world and instead vicariously simulating that risk and pain through the narcotic satiation of commodified sport.

So, I have a bit of a decision to make. Do I look for ways to engage with professional sport more healthily? Or do I do something a little more extreme and abstain? I’ve tried not watching matches live but find that I just end up anxiously refreshing the live updates on BBC which may only be marginally less stressful and distracting.

And so, reluctantly, I want to experiment with something more severe. If Brueggemann is right, (it’s probably time I admitted that he might be onto something) then the practice of sabbath is the appropriate resistance to the competition, consumption and distraction glorified by professional sport. So, it is time for a sabbatical – a fast – a divestment from a form of entertainment that has been a significant part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I don’t like who I become when I consume sport. It brings out the worst in me, not the best. This might not be the solution – it could be an overreaction, but in the absence of better ideas I think this is worth a try. For the rest of this year, I am committing to be deliberately inattentive to scorelines, headlines, transfer rumours and highlights.

I will give some thought to what I do instead – old habits die hard so I am not expecting this to be easy. I expect it will be helpful to see this less as giving up something I quite like, and more as choosing something better.

‘Sabbath is a practical divestment so that neighbourly engagement, rather than production and consumption, define our lives.’
Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, 18

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2017), pp. 15-16

The Blackbirds – part 2

Well, the exile is over and I am back at my potting shed table. I am afraid that the blackbirds leaving their nest was not entirely smooth. Shortly after writing the last blog, there was a commotion in our back garden and I rushed to see the blackbird father flapping around a very near full-grown chick lying with a broken neck just outside the shed window.

I told myself that it is just a bird and that these things happen in nature, but I was still upset.

I don’t know what happened to the other chicks and I presume that is good news. There were three eggs when I first discovered the nest, and I presume the absence of any other casualties means that the other two chicks successfully made it out into the big wide world. Once we were sure that there was no more life in the nest, we took down the box of wood, braced for some unpleasant discoveries. To our relief, they had well and truly moved out and left everything neat and tidy.

It’s been an odd experience. Cohabiting with these birds has been a healthy pin-prick of reality to deflate my all-too romanticised view of the natural world. To a large extent, I have bought into a suburban understanding of ‘nature’ which sees ‘the environment’ in general, abstract terms – viewing the countryside as a place of leisure and beauty but from a safe enough distance to avoid the harsher realities of life in the natural world. As I set out on this journey of agrarianism – seeking after greater fidelity to creation, greater integrity to land and place and local community – I know that I have some painful unlearning to do. It will not be possible to truly care for creation in personal, holistic, non-abstract ways and remain insulated from the realities of death and violence.

But I don’t think the solution is simply to toughen up. I don’t want to replace romanticism with cold indifference to death and destruction. There is something in the sorrow I felt as I disposed of that broken little body – fresh-feathers ruffled and scrawny legs askew – something more than the squeamishness of a sheltered life, something that I think is good. It’s the deep sense that this is not the way that things should be.

Of course, a dead blackbird is a very trivial demonstration of the wrongness of things in our world. But it is still wrong, and in that moment, it got under my skin enough to lead me to place of grief. And I don’t do grief well. I have had the rare privilege of being able to opt out of grief through most of my life. Whilst that’s comfortable, I am coming to realise that it is not altogether good for me. Because grief – lament – is the right response to all that is wrong and broken in our world – whether something as small as a dead blackbird or as huge as wars and pandemics.

Numbness – borne of my unfamiliarity with grief – is a very useful defence mechanism – but it also limits my capacity to engage honestly with reality.

Perhaps then, this unexpected saga with the blackbirds in my shed has helped me to see a little clearer a small part of the journey ahead of me. As I re-root my imagination in the rich soil of agrarianism – as I learn to slow down, pay attention, settle for less, enjoy it more, be a good neighbour and embrace a deeper, more contemplative rhythm of life – I want to do so in a way that embraces rather than escapes the reality of death and violence in our world. I have a suspicion that my capacity to grieve may well be linked to my capacity to wonder and my capacity to love. I cannot grow only two of them – I need all three.

The Blackbirds – part 1

Years ago, when I shared this house with three other guys, we were very kindly given a sixteen-foot shed. We didn’t need anything so big, but friends were getting rid of it, and we didn’t have any other offers. Over a number of weeks, we disassembled it and then did the best our limited carpentry skills would allow us to put it all back together in our back garden where, aside from the occasional collapsed roof, it has remained, rickety and patched up, but undeniably spacious. It is a nice place to be when it isn’t too cold. We have an old dining table in there. When I want a change of scene, away from distractions and beyond the reach of wifi, I sit there and write. Hence, notes from the potting shed.

A few weeks ago, however, I discovered that I had guests in the potting shed. A couple of blackbirds had decided to build a nest on top of a cardboard box filled with wood I was drying for the fire pit. Either they had built it very fast, or I was spectacularly unobservant for a while because when I discovered the nest it was fully constructed. And they had laid eggs.

I panicked a little when I saw the eggs. Haunted by childhood memories of baby blackbirds attempting flight prematurely and meeting a messy end on the pavement outside our house, I decided I needed to ring my mum for advice. Much, I am sure, to the relief of the blackbirds, she told me that I must not move the nest, and that I should give them as much space as I could.

So that was that. A summer of writing at my shed table written off because some blackbirds had lazily mistaken a box of twigs in a shed for a nice regular tree. I’ve done my best to be generous to the squatters – using an old dust sheet to partition the shed off – their half and my half.

Mild inconvenience though it is to cede half of my shed to a couple of birds with dubious taste in nest-making, Mr and Mrs Blackbird have steadily won me over to their cause. They work tirelessly and selflessly for their young. I oversaw one particular act of heroism when the dominant cat of the neighbourhood came prowling along the nearby fence. This is not a cat to be messed with – I have seen him fighting the other cats in the neighbourhood off so that he can claim exclusive toileting rights to my garden. But Mr Blackbird’s screeches and repeated divebombing saw the cat beat a hasty retreat when he ventured a little too close to the nest.

From the endless supply of worms that Mr and Mrs Blackbird are now bringing into the shed, and the tiny chorus that greets their entry, it seems that the eggs have hatched over past few days. I cannot help but admire the tenacity and nurture of these parents. They have slowly worn away my frustration at the inconvenience of it all and I’m finding myself really quite emotionally invested in their survival. We will see what the coming weeks have in store.